NABOKOV’S CROSSING: DIFFEREND IN PALE FIRE

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  M.A.Thesis

  In English Literature

 NABOKOV’S CROSSING:

DIFFEREND IN PALE FIRE

ABSTRACT

Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a 999-line poem preceded by a foreword and followed by a prolonged annotation, is built around an extended irony: while the poem seems to be a straightforward biographical piece with resounding Romantic characteristics, Charles Kinbote reads a different story into it about the fictional land of Zembla and the fate of its king. The novel, thus, evokes the most persistent obsession of contemporary philosophy: mediation and interpretation. The following study will undertake to manifest, in a precise and textual way, how it is that Kinbote’s interpretation comes about and why it can and must be rejected. To achieve that, the study will draw on the work of a number of 20th-century philosophers (of language), most importantly Ludwig Wittgenstein, to argue that Kinbote’s reading of the poem is made possible only by a deliberate and recurrent act of mis-contextualizing single words of the poem; that is, Kinbote takes certain words of the poem out of their immediate contexts, out of their surrounding words, and places them among certain other words so that they acquire new significations. This will be framed in terms of Wittgenstein’s theory of language-games.